Generative Artificial Intelligence and Copyright Law in India: Rethinking Authorship, Ownership and Infringement

This paper examines the impact of GenAI technology on India’s copyright law, which inherently mandates human authorship. With the help of doctrinal research and surveys among stakeholders, it becomes clear that Indian laws, especially the provision in Section 2(d)(vi) of the Copyright Act, 1957, are insufficient to regulate AI-generated content and data scraping at the stage of training. Important issues in this regard are ownership distribution between creators and end-users of AI and the question whether data scraping for large language models i.e., LLMs is considered a copyright violation or falls under fair use.